Can You Make A Living Off Online Poker
Video poker games are one of those few games in casinos you can win. It is not a quick way to get rich, but with perseverance, discipline and knowledge, you can succeed just like the video poker experts. We hope these articles will help you along the way. Making a Living Playing Video Poker Articles: 1. Slots and Poker 2. But a small percentage of players actually use poker to earn a living. You can make a year's worth of rent in a few hours (I've done this many times), or you can go months of full-time play.
- Can You Make A Living Off Online Poker Game
- Can You Make A Living Off Online Poker Vegas World
- Can You Make A Living Off Online Poker
- Can You Make A Living Off Online Poker Deuces Wild
- How To Make A Living Off Online Poker
(After you read this post, you might want to check out my follow-up to it here.)
I tell a lot of people not to play large-field online MTTs for a living. I’ve always thought that the variance is just way too high for most professionals to trust their livelihood (and sanity) to large-field MTTs instead of cash, smaller-field MTTs, or STTs. But, admittedly, I’ve given this advice without any direct evidence to back it up. I’ve been meaning for a while to see what the numbers say, and this post will be a tentative first step.
Ideally, what I’d like to do is do a nice controlled study where I pick a few representative players based on past results and use their results over the next few months as my data. (Alternatively, I could take the results of one of the large backing groups. If anyone who backs 20+ people would be down to share some information, let me know.) But, that requires more motivation than I’ve been able to muster, so I decided to do a much rougher study: I grabbed Shaun “SFD” Deeb’s tourney results from OPR (with Shaun’s permission) and played around for a few hours. Here’s what I found:
I used Shaun’s results from January 2009 to present on Stars and FTP. I filtered for buy-ins between $55 and $216 and included only NLHE tourneys with at least 181 entrants. OPR doesn’t record rebuys, so I removed rebuy tourneys. This left 3,049 tourneys with an average buy-in of $119.72 in which Deeb earned $294,027 with an awesome ROI of 81% and an ITM of 11.5%. Obviously, not many people can play or run as well as Shaun Deeb, but these results provide a starting point.
Can You Make A Living Off Online Poker Game
Say you are Shaun Deeb, you really do have an ROI of 81%, and you’re going to play 1,000 of these tourneys. What are the odds you make money? What are the odds you make at least $50k? Etc etc. Here are the results of one thousand Shaun Deebs each playing one thousand tourneys:
In particular, Shaun loses over a 1,000 tournaments sample about 13% of the time, and he makes less than $50k about 35% of the time (with an EV of about $100k). Of course, the upside is pretty good too–He makes over $200k about 14% of the time and over $300k almost 4% of the time.
Here’s the same data for a larger sample of 3,000 tournaments:
Over 3,000 tourneys, Shaun wins about 98.6% of the time, and he wins over $150k over 82% of the time. He made over $900k once in my 1,000 trials ($915,134) and over $600k about 6% of the time.
Can You Make A Living Off Online Poker Vegas World
But, say you’re not Shaun Deeb. I can make a lower ROI player by simply taking Shaun’s distribution and lowering the payouts. (For an ROI of x, multiply the prizes by (1+x)*0.554 .) This isn’t very accurate, but it’s good enough for my purposes (especially since Shaun has a low ITM%). Here’s the 1,000 tourney histogram for a 20% ROI player:
As you can see, the situation is way worse. This player loses about 45% of the time and loses over $50,000 about 7% of the time. That’s pretty terrible, but maybe things get better with a larger sample? Here’s the data for 3000 Tourneys:
A 20% ROI player will be a loser over a 3,000 tourney sample almost 26% of the time. That’s much higher than I’d expected, and it’s the sort of number that should scare the shit out of prospective and current MTT professionals–If you want to play MTTs for a living, you better either put in a ton of volume, play really well, or be prepared to be a slave to variance (and nobody’s actually prepared for that).
Here’s lots of data for lots of situations (sorry for the ugly formatting):
| ROI | Tourneys Played | Expected Earn | Chance of Loss | Chance of Earning < .5x EV | Chance of Earning > 1.5x EV | Chance of Earning > 2x EV |
| 20% | 100 | $2,394.53 | 65% | 67% | 30% | 28% |
| 20% | 500 | $11,972.65 | 53% | 60% | 30% | 25% |
| 20% | 1000 | $23,945.30 | 42% | 50% | 36% | 31% |
| 20% | 2000 | $47,890.60 | 33% | 44% | 35% | 25% |
| 20% | 5000 | $119,726.50 | 20% | 38% | 30% | 17% |
| 40% | 100 | $4,789.06 | 61% | 65% | 27% | 23% |
| 40% | 500 | $23,945.30 | 37% | 51% | 31% | 26% |
| 40% | 1000 | $47,890.60 | 29% | 44% | 32% | 23% |
| 40% | 2000 | $95,781.20 | 14% | 33% | 28% | 17% |
| 40% | 5000 | $239,453.00 | 6% | 26% | 21% | 8% |
| 60% | 100 | $7,183.59 | 56% | 63% | 29% | 24% |
| 60% | 500 | $35,917.95 | 29% | 49% | 31% | 25% |
| 60% | 1000 | $71,835.90 | 20% | 41% | 27% | 18% |
| 60% | 2000 | $143,671.80 | 9% | 33% | 26% | 13% |
| 60% | 5000 | $359,179.50 | 1% | 16% | 17% | 4% |
| 80% | 100 | $9,578.12 | 51% | 62% | 25% | 21% |
| 80% | 500 | $47,890.60 | 24% | 46% | 28% | 22% |
| 80% | 1000 | $95,781.20 | 12% | 36% | 28% | 16% |
| 80% | 2000 | $191,562.40 | 5% | 27% | 23% | 9% |
| 80% | 5000 | $478,906.00 | 0% | 13% | 12% | 2% |
| 100% | 100 | $11,972.65 | 47% | 61% | 24% | 18% |
| 100% | 500 | $59,863.25 | 18% | 44% | 25% | 20% |
| 100% | 1000 | $119,726.50 | 9% | 35% | 25% | 11% |
| 100% | 2000 | $239,453.00 | 1% | 24% | 18% | 5% |
| 100% | 5000 | $598,632.50 | 0% | 8% | 10% | 1% |
There’s obviously a lot of information there, but some things jump out. In particular, life totally sucks if you’re a 20% ROI player. Even if you play 5k tourneys (which would be a decent sample for an entire year), you still have a 20% chance of losing money and a 38% chance of making less than ~60k. That totally sucks. Anyone except a true tourney god is more likely to lose over 100 tourneys than to win, which also sucks, and even a great tourney player has a decent chance of losing over 1k+ tournaments or to make only half her expected earn over 5k tournaments. Of course, the upside is good too, but the risk of losing money should be pretty scary to professional MTT players.
Can You Make A Living Off Online Poker
I should mention that this data lines up pretty well with my experience. I know a lot of professional MTT players. Losing months are incredibly common for them, and losing years happen fairly often. Years where they way underperform their expectations are typical. So, I hope people consider this before deciding to play (or continue playing) these for a living. People who are really good at MTTs, willing to put in tons of volume, and have huge bankrolls and strong stomachs might be better off playing large field MTTs professionally, but there aren’t many of those people. I think for the vast majority of people, it’s not a good idea (even for those who play very well).
Can You Make A Living Off Online Poker Deuces Wild
How To Make A Living Off Online Poker
You can find more data and some discussion about the distribution here and here. In future posts (probably coming soon, but I’m not making any promises), I’ll compare this data to cash games (both NLHE and PLO), STTs, and small field MTTs (i.e. 45s and 180s). I’ll also look into how stuff like this affects backing. So, if that stuff interests you, stay tuned or whatever. You can follow me on twitter if you want to know when my posts go up, or just subscribe to my RSS feed.